


There's a First Time for Everything

by lessthanpie



Category: Quantum Leap
Genre: F/M, Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2006
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-25
Updated: 2006-12-25
Packaged: 2017-11-21 07:13:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/594934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lessthanpie/pseuds/lessthanpie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I acknowledge the canon date error, as this has Sam leaping into a time before he was born. I'm going to pretend that because Al is there and it's within HIS life that it's okay, instead of rewriting the whole thing six years later as I upload it from the old site. :)</p></blockquote>





	There's a First Time for Everything

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Diana Williams](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Diana+Williams).



 

 

June 30, 1950

_Sam Beckett never really remembered who he had been the moment before when he suddenly found himself as someone else. The new shape of himself consumed him completely in the instant he became them. He could always tell right away when he was a woman again, even if he still had all of his own parts. It was the clothes, making him feel something he wasn't. At least he was pretty this time, dark hair and dark eyes staring back at him from the mirror._

"Mary Theresa!" he heard a harsh voice shouting from another room. "Don't you hear the door? They're here for the wake. Get down here."

"Oh, boy," he muttered.

It had been a shock, to say the least, to see her in the waiting room. When the leap had begun, Al had only been amazed to see the first girl he had thought he had loved. Even though he knew it was Sam, it still brought him back to fifteen, clumsy teenage fumblings in the back of her mother's car. Not that he'd ever admit to the fumblings, but even Al Calavicci was not born smooth with women. Everyone had to start somewhere, and he had started with Mary Theresa Mirelli.

He couldn't stop staring at the Sam's reflection in the mirror. He hadn't ever expected to see her again, and certainly not looking as beautiful as she had looked the last time he'd seen her, hair blowing back in the wind. Just like he'd left her, so long ago.

"What?" Sam asked, wondering who he could be to make Al look at him like that. "I'm not you again, obviously. Who is she?"

"No," Al said, still staring. "This is a lot better than seeing myself again." He turned to the link in his hand, though he did not need Ziggy to tell him who this leap was about. "Your name is Mary Theresa Mirelli. You're sixteen, just outside of Chicago, and it's nineteen fifty." The hand link squawked when he hit it. "June 30, 1950, to be precise."

"Ziggy says it's an ninety four point seven percent chance you're here to save her mother. Kathleen Mirelli will kill herself a little less than one year from tonight, on the first anniversary of her only son's death. Your - er, Mary Theresa's- brother, Anthony, died on the first day of the Korean War. Five days ago."

That Al did not have to look at the information from Ziggy to know these details did not escape Sam. "Did you know her?" he asked.

"Biblically," answered Al, unable to stop his leer.

Sam rolled his eyes and smoothed down the skirt he was wearing, knowing Al was eyeing his - her - legs. It wasn't the first time, and he never really got used to it.

"But it wasn't just that." With Sam looking like this particular girl, Al really felt a need to explain. "She was the first girl I... you know. _Knew._. Knew _well_ , if you know what I mean."

"I always know what you mean," hissed Sam. "And this is not the time or the place."

"No, that's later on tonight," he said almost absently. "I was a very comforting boy her mother didn't really approve of."

"I'm sure you were. Now why am I here now, when her mother doesn't die for a year?"

"I, uh, don't know. Ziggy's working on it. Something besides the obvious, I assume. Something you can affect tonight, I hope. Because otherwise, you as Mary Theresa is going to have to do... me."

"I think I can resist your charms," said Sam dryly.

"Maybe, but Mary Theresa really couldn't. And do you want to be the one to deprive all the ladies of the future of the things I'll be learning later tonight in the backseat of big brother's Oldsmobile?"

"I think we need to figure this out and get me out of here before then," said Sam, not really wanting to think much further along on that particular subject. "Unless _that_ is what I'm here to fix."

Al refused to even answer that, instead focusing on the girl he had loved ever since he had seen her in her bathing suit on a hot day. It had fueled more than one teenage fantasy, and she sometimes still crept into his dreams when he wasn't paying attention.

"She told me that she was afraid she was invisible to her mother. That she didn't really see her or know she was there, and that she was afraid she would let herself fade away, now that her son was gone as well as her husband and there was no one who needed her anymore. She didn't know how to tell her mother she was there."

"Then all I have to do is make sure Mary Theresa's mother knows she loves her, and the problem is solved, right?"

"Ninety nine percent possibility that's correct, according to Ziggy."

"Who are you talking to?" The woman in the doorway looked like Mary Theresa, only impossibly exhausted by life and loss.

"Nobody, Mama," Sam answered for the girl as Al looked on. "Anthony, maybe."

"He isn't here," her mother answered, her voice hard and cold. "There's nobody here."

"There's me, Mama. I'm here. I always will be." Sam crossed the room and hugged her, and from the woman's stiffness, he did not think that was something that happened often.

She softened a bit and smiled, and patted her daughter on the cheek before leaving the room.

The hand link squawked, and Al couldn't quite believe it. "Kathleen Mirelli still dies. In her sleep, twenty two years from now."

"That's it?" Sam was incredulous. "Easiest leap ever."

"Except why haven't you leaped yet?"

Sam spent the evening at a wake for a brother who was not his, waiting to leap out and into his next assignment, trying not to change history for anyone else. And when a familiar boy took his hand and Mary Theresa out to the car parked out back, waiting for an owner who would never return and so passed on to his sister, he couldn't refuse.

"I've been waitin' on you to kiss me first," said the young Al, and his older counterpart snorted. He had forgotten this, how shy he'd been at first to kiss this girl he'd wanted so badly.

"She has to kiss him," he told Al, not even needing to check with Ziggy. "If she doesn't, this-" He indicated himself. "Is not going to happen."

"Oh, boy," sighed Sam, and leaned forward to kiss young Al.

 _Leap over, and hopefully less kissing of friends in the next one,_ Sam thought as he was consumed by the light of the leap.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I acknowledge the canon date error, as this has Sam leaping into a time before he was born. I'm going to pretend that because Al is there and it's within HIS life that it's okay, instead of rewriting the whole thing six years later as I upload it from the old site. :)


End file.
